Land use and other economic policies drove people to the shitty factory jobs no one wanted during industrialization. Continued participation requires ongoing coercion and new examples.

ishmael2009

Nothing to do with incredibly repressive lives as peasants in feudal society then?

emperorreagan

More repressive than factory life and the disease/crime/dirt/etc. of industrial era cities? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue that early industrial cities represented a quality of life improvement. Some of the more optimistic historians will argue that the quantitative improvements people saw offset the qualitative decline.

Quantitative improvements over the period of industrialization isn’t a satisfying answer for why people went to the city for the factory jobs, though, as the early period (until ~1820) saw stagnant real wages in Britain.

Anarchy Pony

Best vid in a while Lee. Epic lulz.

Reuben_the_Red

Thanks Lee, I needed a way to laugh about that. Although you’re talking about people who are gardening for the sake of sustainability and self-reliance, I think you’re right that it is anathema to Western consumer culture that people could or would unhook from the Giant Teat of electricity and grocery stores and general consumer lifestyles. At least, I can’t think of another reason to explain why so much excessive law enforcement and brutality against relatively harmless and isolated hippies at Burning Man and Rainbow Gathering events…

While the incidents you mention in Texas and Florida could just be typical law enforcement overreach and paranoia, not necessarily an ideological showdown, this goes back to the Indian Problem of the 19th century, when peoples who were completely self-reliant and obtained all their food sustainably and independently were rounded up and put in concentration camps and forced to purchase food from trading posts… Anyone who refused to submit themselves to a concentration camp was legally considered hostile, and also considered a legal Alien, even if they lived where their parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ had lived for countless centuries. And according to Silvia Frederici (“Caliban and the Witch,” 2004) a similar dynamic can be traced much further back to the witch hunts and public torture/execution of the late Middle Ages, and that the ideology driving the witch hunts was in large part depriving ordinary folks of their commons, communities, and self-reliance, so that everyone was forced to rely on the nation-state.

As Daniel Quinn put it, How do you get people to work harder and longer for less return and more insecurity? Lock up the food. And I guess if that doesn’t work, then lock up the seeds and douse the countryside in Agent Orange.